Without seeing the min hardware requirements for OpenMediaVault (a quick bing didn't bring up anything useful) That is looking like some extreme overkill for a NAS unit with 2x HDD's.

Is this going to be purely for filestorage?

[Edit: I see you've answered the other question between me reading and posting]

+1

Hardware looks like it should work but other questions are more interesting for me. What are you using it for eg serving more than two or more Full HD streams? What disk configuration - RAID? Only 4TB storage - 2TB mirrored? Are you running OpenMediaVault from a USB stick?

I've always used my old systems for NAS given that the primary bottleneck is often the network. You don't mention the network so I presume Gigabit which will be harder to saturate. If you're also dong lots of writing to the NAS then faster disks will be more important.

bmf25: No also as a media server (video, audio etc). Either FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault. I will add HDs at a later stage.

Depending upon what you decide to implement you may need to consider whether you should add disks sooner rather than later. For example, you will give yourself more options by adding disk early if using ZFS with FreeNAS.

So what about ZFS with an extra couple of 2GB HDs? What graphics card would you recommend? I'm pretty new to all this but am keen to give it go. Any suggestions about build hardware are much appreciated. Thanks

bmf25: So what about ZFS with an extra couple of 2GB HDs? What graphics card would you recommend? I'm pretty new to all this but am keen to give it go. Any suggestions about build hardware are much appreciated. Thanks

As has been said, your proposed system looks like overkill, more like a gaming PC. So if you've got a spare PC lying with at least a 100Mbit card in it then I'd recommend you try setting up a two-disk configuration and try out FreeNAS or OpenView or whatever. You will be able to see what sort of service you can get by streaming Full-HD video. You will have a much better idea of what you need without spending much money. Later on, if you decide to get a faster system you can copy over the files and maybe leave the old system for testing.

GraphicsGood spotting by shadybrothers. As it's only used as a server you can get the least/cheapest PCIE that will work with it.

ZFSWhether you use ZFS or not depends upon the importance of your data. I had a disk start deteriorating and the first sign that anything was seriously wrong was ZFS finding data errors. Of course, I still had to replace the disk and restore a backup of that file but otherwise I wouldn't have known until more serious problems developed.

If your data is not that important or you do regular backups then you may not need ZFS. I tended to use ZFS for RAID instead of RAID controllers so that I could move my disks to another PC more easily. I'm not sure if that is an issue for you. I had to do it once and it worked great rebuilding the zpool from disk.

I haven't used FreeNAS for a year so there might be new features that change what I'm saying here. A virtual device (vdev) can have multiple disks but you can't add more to the vdev. It is meant to happen one day but until then new disks are added by adding more vdevs to the storage pool (zpool). Losing a vdev or one of its disks destroys the whole storage pool so I always used redundancy, usually RAIDZ2. This meant I could lose two disks in any vdev and still rebuild. The problem is that to upgrade the vdev capacity I had to upgrade all the drives together. Replace one of the smaller drives with a larger drive then resilver the array and so on until all disks in the vdev had the higher capacity.

Given that you're making a high-end NAS you've got the capacity to add more disks immediately. Whether you do depends upon how you want to use ZFS. Start off with more disks in one vdev or add more vdevs later on.

Thanks for the feedback/suggestions. I guess I just need a sample hardware setup for a NAS that can serve media and provide backup for photos, videos and other files. I would like to us either FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault but am open to suggestions. In terms of Raid vs ZFS, again am open to suggestions. I have used Linux (various distributions) before but am a newbee when it comes to hardware. So if anyone could provide a list (i.e.

Case: ..... CPU: .... RAM: ...) of what they use or have used. I know I could buy a NAS setup and ready to go but I want a challenge and am interested in learning something about hardware in the process.

Re hardware, a quiet and energy efficient system as it will probably be on all the time. More so if it is going to be in a living area. Some people get fanless enclosures and low heat components. All the NAS software should allow you to do things like spin the drives down when not in use, put CPU into low energy mode, etc.